Jailbreak of new iPad (3rd generation) on the horizon?

To all the early adopters of the new iPad who are hoping to add Cydia to their retina-tablet ASAP, fret not as the Dev Team have posted some encouraging news regarding its eventual Jailbreak. This comes on the heels of the iPad 2 running iOS 5.1 being jailbroken by hacker @i0n1c, which he shared with the rest of the community via several pics he posted on his twitter account. Here’s the “good news” the Dev Team posted on their blog:

We can confirm that the method used to jailbreak the iPad2 4 months ago (before corona) still works even in 5.1. That means we’ll at least be able to get our foot in the door to get the required kernel dumps on the iPad3. That’s an important step, but by no means is it the end of the story.

Those of you following @i0n1c may have noticed he’s already tweeted pictures of his iPad2 jailbroken at 5.1. As far as we know, he’s using a method completely unrelated to the one mentioned above. That would be great news!

We’ve also seen bits and pieces of an entirely different jailbreak method being investigated by someone close to the Cydia repo scene.

That’s three different angles, and we’re not even including the continuous work @pod2g makes towards a new jailbreak! As always, keep in mind this is very preliminary progress, and it’s impossible to predict how or when these things turn out.

And one important thing to note for would-be jailbreakers is NOT to “update your new iPad3 past whatever iOS it comes shipped with”. The blog post explains that it’s entirely possible that some of the new iPads have OSes other than 5.1 installed. So if by slim chance you get one with 5.0.1 onboard, best play it safe and don’t upgrade to 5.1 for the time being (assuming you’re hoping to eventually jailbreak the device).

By the looks of it, iPad 3 owners likely won’t have to wait months before a jailbreak solution is offered, unlike that of the iPad 2.